life as he apprentices himself to the mysterious
Tower Society comprising enlightened aristocrats
who will guide him towards his true calling. In Plots
of Enlightenment: Education and Novel in Eighteenth
Century England (1999), Richard A. Barney argues
that the conjunction of the early novel with theories
of education reflects the cultural developments of
the 18th century. He states that “educational theory
during the late 17th and 18th century formed an
indispensable source for the novel’s narrative form
and its often contradictory representation of indi-
vidual social identity” (2).
Education is an important theme in Victorian
fiction, not just through the bildungsroman, or com-
ing of age novel, but also in the form of a critique
of methods of education, of corporal punishment,
and of inhumane boarding schools such as those
portrayed in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane eyre
(1847). The harsh and inhumane conditions of
Lowood, the boarding school that Jane is dispatched
to after she rebels against Mrs. Reed, reflect the des-
perate conditions of many real schools in England at
that time. The hypocrisy of Brocklehurst, who lives a
life of luxury while preaching the values of a Spartan
life for the girls at Lowood highlights the hypocrisy
of the moneyed patrons of many of these so-called
charitable educational institutions run for the poor.
The bildungsroman, or “novel of formation,” is
essentially a novel of education as it traces the jour-
ney of a character from childhood to adulthood
through education and the life experiences that he
or she has. Charles Dickens’s david copper-
F ieLd (1849–50) Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39), and
Great expectations (1860–61) are all novels that
tell stories of rags to riches made possible through
education and wealthy benefactors, but they also
count the tragic toll in loss of friendships and self
included in this process. In Dombey and Son (1846–
48), Dickens offers a critique of the emphasis on
acquiring classical languages in schools as a passport
to university admission and upward social mobil-
ity. The force-feeding of the boys is communicated
through the aptly named Mr. Feeder’s method of
instruction: “They knew no rest from the pursuit
of strong-hearted verbs, savage noun-substantives,
inflexible syntactic passages, and ghosts of exercises
that appeared to them in their dreams” (11).
Contemporary cultural theorists recognize the
vital relationship between power, knowledge, and
cultural development. Literature as an expression
and constituent of culture plays an integral role in
the perpetuation of certain power relations, whether
they are of class, caste, or gender relations. In
annie John, Jamaica Kincaid unmasks this colo-
nial mission through the examination of colonial
institutions such as the convent schools of various
missionary orders. In particular, she excoriates the
soft propaganda of British colonial rule through
the widespread teaching of William Wordsworth’s
poem “Daffodils.” Generations of students from
Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean have memo-
rized “Daffodils” as the very epitome of romantic
imagination and cultured sensibility, despite never
having set sight on a daffodil. The daffodil only
grows in temperate zones and is foreign to the tropi-
cal climes of these colonized places.
If literature functions as a hegemonic tool to
shape the sensibility of the colonized, it also func-
tions as a counter-hegemonic tool by inspiring
writings of resistance through the ideals of liberty,
equality, and the brotherhood of man as set out in
the works of Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, and Karl
Marx. Much of postcolonial literature embodies
this ambivalent function of education, as in Tsi Tsi
Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (1988), in which
the character Tambu aspires to wealth and status
through education, but this very education becomes
a culturally alienating force where she loses touch
with her roots and family.
Learning, knowledge, and culture are closely
allied to literature, and consequently education and
literature share a symbiotic relationship. By exten-
sion, adjectives such as literate, educated, cultured,
and learned are synonyms of each other and reflect a
conglomerate of desired attributes that are centered
in and expressed through literature. Both education
and literature work hand in hand as powerful trans-
formative tools that can shape minds and hearts and
in turn effect change for the better.
See also Adams Henry: education oF henry
adaMs, the; Amis, Kingsley: Lucky JiM; Brad-
bury, Ray: Fahrenheit 451; Byron, George Gor-
don Byron, Lord: don Juan; Emerson, Ralph
Waldo: “American Scholar, The”; Haley, Alex,education 27